[bananamogul]

Wow, Steam Frame has only B&W passthrough...[1]

The Quest 3S has color passthrough and it's hardly an Apple-level device, and it's $349 in comparison.

I guess as a gamer, I don't care that much. I put on my headset to game, and if I need to step away for a moment, I'm more likely to take it off than to wander around my house with a headset on. Still, I thought color passthrough was now table stakes for a headset.

[1] https://www.pcgamer.com/hardware/vr-hardware/the-steam-frame...

[3092-8121-9924]

I think it's not purely unmotivated cost-cutting. They went for IR sensors and have embedded IR LEDs for low-light tracking, and i figure colour passthrough would have required additional cameras.

[hgoel]

IIRC there were rumors that the headset would have an open PCIe slot for such things to be added. Presumably they were passed on as defaults for cost reasons.

[starkparker]

Not rumors: https://www.theverge.com/games/816118/valve-steam-frame-vr-h...

> The Frame’s four outward-facing monochrome cameras and IR illuminator seem to provide excellent tracking, though in a brief demo, the black-and-white passthrough view wasn’t useful for much except getting a general idea of my surroundings. Rowe says sticking with monochrome passthrough was an intentional choice because color passthrough would have added to the Frame’s price. “The core focus of the device is the gaming,” Rowe says.

> For those who want color passthrough and other changes to the headset, Valve has made its headset modular, including a dedicated expansion port in the nose piece designed to support extra cameras. The expansion port offers 2.5Gbps of bandwidth via MIPI and one lane of PCIe data.

[simjnd]

Yes, same. I'll still get one because I think it being a standalone Linux computer is huge, and I'm so interested in the Proton / Lepton stacks to run Windows and Android games but yeah this is a pretty big compromise.